The story
In Vienna's MuseumsQuartier, among the baroque buildings of the former imperial stables, stands a dark block clad in grey basalt lava. This is mumok, the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna, designed by the brothers Laurids and Manfred Ortner and opened in 2001. Inside are some 10,000 works from classical modernism to the present, with Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys and Jasper Johns among the names.
The museum is older than its building. It opened in 1962 as the Museum of the 20th Century, housed in Karl Schwanzer's Austrian pavilion from the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, re-erected in the Schweizergarten park. In 1981 the German collectors Peter and Irene Ludwig helped set up an Austrian Ludwig Foundation, which turned part of their long-term loans into a permanent holding.
Vienna's own story runs through the collection. Mumok is known for its large holdings of Viennese Actionism, the radical performance art of the 1960s by Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Earlier Viennese modernism is here too, including Richard Gerstl's portrait of the Schoenberg family from 1907. Gerstl, a young painter close to the composer Arnold Schoenberg, later began an affair with Schoenberg's wife Mathilde, and when it ended in 1908 he took his own life at the age of 25.
